Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. – Psalm 90:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (November 6, 2018): Psalm 90

Stephanie Perkins in her novel, “Anna and the French Kiss” asks this question; “Is it possible for home to be a person and not a place?” It is an interesting question. Where is it that you consider to be home? I live in a house on a residential street in a fairly large city (the metropolitan area contains just over a million people). The house I live in is where my kids lived when they were in High School and College. But it is not the only place that we have lived. There was another house in the same city and a house in a small rural town (less than three thousand people) where my children were born. BK (Before Kids) we lived in another house, and an apartment, and a basement suite in a city that is slightly larger than the one that I live in now.

And then there were the places where I lived as I grew up. I was born in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada, an urban area just outside of Toronto. And while my family moved away from the area when I was only eight, I still have some relatives who are very important to me who currently reside in the area. So, where is home? If I ever became famous, where is it that I would want to place the sign that proudly proclaims “This is the home of Garry Mullen?” Where would you want your sign placed?

And then there is this question, what is it that holds me in my current place of residence? As I consider career changes, where is it that I would consider moving? And the answer to that question has absolutely nothing to do with job, climate or even friends. It has everything to do with being close to my daughter and son, and my four grandchildren, all of whom I love more than words can describe. Home is where they are. Home is a person, or rather a group of people, who have my heart in their hands. As fond as I am of the places where I have lived, and as proud as I am to have, at one point in my life, claimed these places as my home, my current home is found in people, in family, and not a place.

Moses, speaking on a spiritual level, reminds his followers that God is home. We don’t know when this Psalm was written, but placing it after the death of Miriam and Aaron makes sense. The siblings of Moses were important to him, part of his family. The nation was roaming the desert and had just experienced some significant opposition. And at this moment, Moses chooses to remind Israel that this was not their home. Their dwelling place, their shelter, and place of refuge was with God. And this was not new. It was not something that just started at the time that God brought them out of Egypt. God had been their place of refuge for generations, reaching back in time to the eras of the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as stretching into the unknown generations of the future.

For Moses, shaken from the deaths of his siblings, this was the reminder that he needed to hear. Where he lived was not his home. His home was the place where God lived and where God reigned. And he longed to go there.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Numbers 21